Monday 30 November 2009 07.30 EST
First published on Monday 30 November 2009 07.30 EST

Charges of antisemitism should never be used as a political football. A group of prominent Conservative-leaning British Jews were absolutely right when they wrote this in a letter to the Daily Telegraph recently, calling for an end to attacks on Michal Kaminski, the controversial Polish politician who leads the group the Tories now belong to in the European parliament.

But it would be desperately parochial to refuse to examine political attitudes towards Jews and other minorities in eastern Europe, merely for fear of possibly handing an advantage to Labour or Conservatives on the narrow British stage.

It would be wrong – just because Britain suddenly has an indirect interest in the subject – to ignore a tendency by some intellectuals and politicians to reframe the killing of Jews by Nazi collaborators during the second world war simply as part of a historical tit-for-tat, a tendency that seeks in effect to "balance" Jewish and non-Jewish guilt.

And that is a tendency in which Kaminski, for whatever reason, has played a bit part.

There is no evidence that Kaminski is antisemitic today. Or indeed, that he has ever personally disliked Jews, if that is what antisemitic means. He is certainly a strong public supporter of the state of Israel. But what BBC's Newsnight discovered on a recent visit to Poland is that eight years ago, when the country was engaged in a huge public debate about Polish participation in pogroms in 1941, Kaminski encouraged people to speak out against Jews.

In 2001, he went to Jedwabne, scene of one of the wartime massacres, and urged elderly participants at a public meeting to describe how Jews had supposedly denounced some of their Catholic neighbours to the Soviets who occupied the region from 1939 to 1941.

One of the participants in the 2001 meeting, Maria Mazurczyk, told us: "I think that Mr Kaminski, like us, wanted everything to be revealed: the times before the war when things were good – and the time of the Soviet occupation when the Jews didn't respect their Polish neighbours – and later the effect of all this."

At the time Kaminski condemned Poles who'd killed Jews – though he suggested the massacre was principally carried out by Germans. But it appears his principal concern was with alleged Jewish guilt. Anna Bikont of the liberal Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, who spent much time in Jedwabne in 2001 while researching a book, says: "Mr Kaminski came to the place where an incredible crime was committed – and he told not about the women, children, old people who died in this horrible manner, but he told about Jews who collaborated with Soviets and who killed Poles."

Would a British politician who'd behaved in a similar way survive in the mainstream of British politics? The question is relevant in some ways – but in others, of course, not. Poland's recent past has been so much more tumultuous and tragic than ours. And partly because of that, history is a constant football in Polish politics. Kaminski wasn't the only or the most important politician to oppose, in 2001, a collective Polish apology for the Jedwabne massacre. Most right and centre-right parties did.

Equally, Kaminski is not the only politician in a mainstream party who's been accused of anti-Jewish attitudes in the past. One, who was a fellow MEP for PiS (Law and Justice) until he resigned from the party earlier this year, called in 2006 for the demolition of a synagogue in his home town, Poznan, on the grounds that its original construction had been an "openly anti-Polish act". Another current PiS MP told the Catholic radio station Radio Maryja a few years ago that he could not say whether the notorious forgery of the tsarist secret police, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was genuine or not, but that "there are Jewish groups capable of thinking long-term about damaging other societies, and we certainly have experience of that in our own past".

Do such utterances matter? Now the Conservatives' choice of partners has become so controversial, it's hard to raise the issue in Britain without accusations of party bias. But in the long term, the state of politics in Poland – one of the EU's largest states – is surely important to us all, Poles included.